What is the Role and Responsibility of a For-Profit Public Company?

The way forward.

Our 2017 Global Social Impact Performance report marks our progress as a company, one that’s performance-driven through the lens of humanity. Together with our more than 330,000 partners and organizations like Conservation International and Feeding America, we can use our scale for good.

We’ve made this progress by being purposeful in our decisions and our collective actions, and we have bold, new aspirations for the years ahead. Our efforts are focused in four areas where our commitment and scale can make the biggest impact:

SUSTAINABLE COFFEE: Working to make coffee the world’s first sustainable agricultural product.

GREENER RETAIL: Building and operating the world’s largest green retail business.

CREATING OPPORTUNITIES: Investing in pathways to opportunity through employment, education and training.

STRENGTHENING COMMUNITIES: Welcoming all and creating impact on issues that matter.

OUR FUTURE IN SUSTAINABLE COFFEE

Committed to 100 percent ethically sourced coffee everywhere.

Since 2015 Starbucks® coffee has been verified 99 percent ethically sourced, the largest coffee retailer to achieve this milestone. While we are committed to our goal of reaching 100 percent, we believe it’s that last one percent where our work can make the biggest impact. It’s here—working with still-developing coffee farmers—where we can help them improve the quality of their coffee and the growing conditions of their farms. And by sharing our best practices with others in the industry, we hope to reach not just 100 percent in our own supply chain, but make coffee the first sustainable agricultural product.

AN OPEN-SOURCE APPROACH
Behind the beverages served in our 28,000 stores each day are more than two million farmers and workers who grow our coffee around the world. C.A.F.E. (Coffee and Farmer Equity) Practices is our cornerstone coffee-buying program consisting of best practices that has the potential to increase the prosperity and resiliency of farms and livelihoods. Starbucks also invests in coffee communities, sharing agronomy practices and our coffee knowledge. We leverage technology to develop new approaches to ensure the future of high-quality coffee, including a new traceability pilot project announced in 2018.

Starbucks operates nine Farmer Support Centers in key coffee-producing countries around the world, from Yunnan, China, and Kigali, Rwanda, to our newest center in Chiapas, Mexico, and a Global Agronomy Center at Hacienda Alsacia in Alajuela, Costa Rica. Our open-source agronomy approach gives farmers access to the latest findings from our top agronomists, including new varietals of disease-resistant trees and soil-management techniques.

In Colombia a public-private partnership with USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development) is training the country’s next generation of coffee farmers in post-conflict regions and transitioning farmers from growing coca (used for the manufacturing of cocaine) to coffee.

With this global network, we have already trained nearly 25,000 coffee farmers and are working to reach 200,000 coffee farmers by 2020.

DONATING HEALTHY COFFEE TREES
Now more than ever, the future of coffee depends on healthy trees. More than 21 million trees have been donated to coffee farmers since 2015, to replace trees that are declining in productivity due to age and disease, such as coffee leaf rust. We are working toward a goal of providing 100 million climate-resilient coffee trees to farmers by 2025.

GLOBAL FARMER FUND
The Starbucks Global Farmer Fund is a $50 million commitment to provide loans to coffee farmers to strengthen their farms through coffee tree renovation and infrastructure improvements, including a $2 million farmer loan commitment from Starbucks in partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to support 2,000 primarily women coffee growers in Colombia. This investment in the future of coffee serves an important need by providing financing to farmers who may not qualify for commercial loans.

MAKING COFFEE THE FIRST SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURAL PRODUCT
We know that the greatest challenges can be solved faster if we work together. That’s why Starbucks is one of the founding members of the Sustainable Coffee Challenge, a diverse industry coalition led by Conservation International with the call to action of making coffee the world’s first sustainable agricultural product.

The Challenge formed in 2015 at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris with 18 like-minded organizations. It has since grown to more than 100 global partners across the industry, including other roasters, nongovernmental organizations and the governments of Mexico and Rwanda, as well as U.S. government partners USAID and USDA. Challenge partners are urgently working together to increase transparency, aligned to the common vision that all coffee can be produced using sustainable practices. In 2017 the Sustainable Coffee Challenge launched its first four action networks to coordinate industry action and investment, including an effort to replace aging trees.

INVESTING IN SUSTAINABILITY
Starbucks issued its first sustainability bond in 2016 with a U.S. corporate bond offering and our first global yen-denominated corporate sustainability bond in March 2017 in Japan. The net proceeds of the latest offering of 86 billion Japanese yen will go toward investments in Starbucks ethical sourcing programs, including operations of Farmer Support Centers in coffeegrowing regions and loans through Starbucks Global Farmer Fund.

ADVANCING TEA AND COCOA SUSTAINABILITY
Like coffee, our approach to buying tea is designed to ensure a long-term, high-quality supply while contributing positively to the environment and farming communities. For more than 10 years, we have partnered with the Ethical Tea Partnership (ETP) to ensure the tea Starbucks sources is produced with sustainable practices and under safe and humane working conditions. As of 2017, nearly 72 percent of tea was ethically sourced and we’re working toward a goal of 100 percent ethically sourced tea by 2020.

For other ingredients such as cocoa, we are working with industry partners such as the World Cocoa Foundation to advance ethical sourcing practices, extending our policy around deforestation and committing to 100 percent ethically sourced beverage ingredients by 2020.

SUSTAINABLE COFFEE 2020 GOALS

Sourcing Commitment
100% Ethically-sourced coffee

Open-source agronomy
Train 200,000 coffee farmers by 2020

Planting Trees
Provide 100 million coffee trees to farmers by 2025

Global Farmer Fund
Invest $50 million in financing for farmers by 2020

LEADING THE WAY IN GREENER RETAIL

Starbucks is building and operating stores with an aim to minimize our environmental footprint with ambitious goals for 2020 and beyond.

GREENER STORES
Starbucks is proud to have built more than 1,500 LEED® (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified stores in 20 countries including all 50 U.S. states and Puerto Rico. We are the largest builder of green stores in our sector and our stores account for 20 percent of the LEED®-certified retail projects globally. We’re developing a new global store verification program to drive innovation, sustainability and efficiencies throughout our store portfolio. The program will include building standards for new and remodeled stores, along with performance standards for all stores in energy and water efficiency, waste reduction and partner engagement. With our goal of 10,000 greener retail stores by 2025, we hope to truly leverage our scale for good and deliver on our ambition to become the world’s largest green retailer.

GREENER CUPS & PACKAGING
Starbucks has a 30-year legacy of progress in our effort to reduce the environmental impact of our to-go cups and single-use packaging. Since 1987 we have offered a discount to our customers who bring in a reusable cup and we were one of the early pioneers of the cup sleeve to eliminate double-cupping. We have been on the forefront of new materials, becoming the first to include post-consumer fiber in our hot cups in 2006, and introducing a more recyclable cup lid in 2017. We have also led the industry in advocating for increased recycling infrastructure to enable our cups to be recycled in more communities. While our cups can be recycled in many communities today, we are working with local governments and stakeholders to increase their acceptance in recycling systems.

But we know we must do more. We are expanding use of strawless lids and accelerating our efforts to achieve a greener cup by 2022. We’re doubling the recycled content in our cups and developing a global solution to give our cups a second life through our new NextGen Cup Challenge. We also are working with industry partners to double the number of stores and communities with access to cup recycling (over our 2016 baseline), including a paper cup recycling launch in stores in The Netherlands. Reusable cups are the greenest option of all, so we are finding new ways to promote and incentivize the use of “for-here” ware and reusable cups. A pilot in London with a paper cup charge has showed promise.

INVESTING IN GREEN POWER
We have invested in renewable energy since 2005, steadily increasing our purchases of renewable energy certificates until we achieved our goal of obtaining 100 percent of the electricity powering global company-operated stores from renewable sources in 2015.

As we embark on the next chapter of our renewable energy strategy, we continue to use our scale to drive innovation across the renewable energy sector. We are taking the next step with direct investments in new geographically relevant renewable energy projects. In North Carolina, we have invested in a solar farm, which delivers enough clean energy to power more than 600 Starbucks® stores in the Southern and Mid-Atlantic United States. And in Washington State, we’re working with Puget Sound Energy to power more than 100 Starbucks® stores and our roasting facility in Kent, with wind power from a wind farm in nearby Olympia.

Starbucks joined with other companies in the commitment to 100 percent renewable energy with the RE100 in 2015, and we work to deepen our impact and adhere to the RE100 Buyers’ Principles to improve our global reporting and purchasing methodology. We are working to source 100 percent renewable energy for global store operations as well as our global supply chain, headquarters and office locations. We are committed to purchasing renewable energy for each global market from projects in the same grid region, and promoting local renewable energy generation in all of the global communities where we operate.

EMPOWERING GREENER PARTNERS
Our partners are the heart and soul of our company, and we are harnessing their passion for sustainability to inspire and teach others. Starbucks® Greener Apron™ program is a voluntary certification that helps partners learn about environmental sustainability through three short modules created with Arizona State University’s School of Sustainability. More than 6,000 partners have participated in the program since its launch in 2016. Our goal is to engage 10,000 partners globally by 2020 through Partners for Sustainability and the Starbucks® Greener Apron™ program to create a network of sustainability champions who advocate sustainability in stores and business every day.

CREATING OPPORTUNITIES THAT MATTER

As a leader in hiring great talent, Starbucks has and will always look to create opportunities for our partners and customers in the communities we serve.

INNOVATING PARTNER BENEFITSStarbucks customizes benefits to meet partner needs around the world. In the U.K., Starbucks is the first private company to help pay rental deposits by providing interest-free loans to employees. Home Sweet Loan offers eligible partners a loan of up to one month’s wages, paid within four weeks of application, to be repaid over the course of a year.

In China, eligible partners can earn a monthly housing subsidy and help care for aging parents with the Starbucks China Parent Care Program, which offers critical illness insurance for eligible partners. In India, partners have a five-day work schedule, down from the country’s customary the six-day workweek. In Canada, the Starbucks Work Placement Program is helping support youth employment programs in Calgary, Toronto and Vancouver, which combine in-class core life skills and employability training with real-life on-the job work placement experience. And in the U.K., Starbucks national apprenticeship program has created more than 1,300 apprenticeships for our partners to grow their skills and careers.

MAKING COLLEGE A REALITY
In the United States, Starbucks helps partners achieve a college degree through the Starbucks College Achievement Plan, a groundbreaking effort in partnership with Arizona State University. We are also lowering barriers to college with efforts such as Pathways to Admission, a program that provides partners the ability to work toward admission tuition-free. More than 1,000 partners have diplomas in hand and more than 9,000 are working toward their degree.

HIRING VETERANS AND MILITARY SPOUSES
Hiring and honoring veterans and military spouses allows us all to benefit from their leadership, experience and willingness to make a difference. In 2013 Starbucks committed to hiring at least 10,000 veterans and military spouses by 2018. In March 2017, we met our goal 18 months early and have extended it to 25,000 hires by 2025. Our commitment goes beyond hiring. It includes the ability for partners who are current members of the U.S. Armed Forces or veterans to extend their College Achievement Plan benefit to a spouse or child.

WELCOMING REFUGEES
Refugees represent a population who seek a chance to rebuild their lives and have a fresh start in the face of extraordinarily difficult circumstances. In keeping with our longstanding history to create opportunity for all and to invest in the people who are a part of the communities where we do business, Starbucks is leading a global effort during the next five years to welcome and employ 10,000 refugees by 2022, including 2,500 refugees in Western Europe and 1,000 refugees in Canada. In the U.S., our efforts include a focus on hiring interpreters, personnel and their families who served alongside U.S. troops overseas to champion their talent, experience and resilience.

EMPLOYING OPPORTUNITY YOUTH
Starbucks is embracing and employing tens of thousands of youth, ages 16–24, who are disconnected from work and school to help them achieve their dreams. Starbucks led the launch of the 100,000 Opportunities Initiative with 50 other employers in 2015. We have since hired 50,000 Opportunity Youth, representing one in five of every partners hired, with a goal of hiring 100,000 in the U.S. by 2020. The coalition is now pushing toward 1 million opportunities by 2021, working together to create new recruiting and human resources practices tailored to hiring, retaining and advancing these young people. Starbucks Canada also launched a new initiative in 2018 to hire 40,000 Opportunity Youth.

In several low- to medium-income U.S. communities we now have Community stores that are equipped with training centers where we work with local nonprofits to provide job-skills training to young people. Our new National Mentoring Partnership, announced in 2018 with LinkedIn, MENTOR, Big Brothers Big Sisters, City Year and Year Up, will help close the gap for 10,000 youth who are awaiting a mentor. Around the world, we offer training and support to young people in ways relevant to their needs and opportunities, such as Starbucks Opportunity Café in the Middle East, which hosts youth training workshops at local Starbucks® stores. We are committed to the success and retention of these new partners at all levels.

CREATING OPPORTUNITIES 2020 GOALS

Veterans and Military Spouses
Hire and honor 25,000 veterans and military spouses by 2025

STRENGTHENING COMMUNITIES IN OUR GLOBAL NEIGHBORHOOD

Each Starbucks® store is a part of a community, and we’re committed to strengthening neighborhoods wherever we do business.

DONATING READY-TO-EAT MEALS
Starbucks partners have long advocated for practical way to donate unsold food to the communities we serve. Through our partnership with Feeding America, we are working to rescue 100 percent of food available to donate from all of our U.S. company-owned stores by 2020. In our first year of the program, we donated food each night from more than 1,700 stores in 17 U.S. markets from Seattle to New York, and have donated more than 3 million meals to food banks. We were also able to provide local food banks with fresh food, water, coffee and snacks to communities facing natural disasters in the U.S. Once the program rollout is complete, we expect to increase our donations to 50 million meals each year.

COMMUNITY SERVICE
We have always believed Starbucks can—and should—have a positive impact on the communities we serve. Community service reflects our mission and values, who we are as a company and one of the single biggest ways we individually and collectively come together to help fill a need.

In 2017 we launched our goal to achieve 100 percent participation by Starbucks® stores across the globe in community service each year by the end of 2020. This first year, 125,000 Starbucks partners participated in more than 16,500 partner-led projects with a focus on sustainability, hunger, youth, veterans and refugees. Projects ranged from cleaning Amsterdam’s famous canals to providing narration for the Cinema for the Blind in Beijing. In the U.S., partners participated in more than 150 projects during Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service 2017.

THE STARBUCKS FOUNDATION
Established in 1997, The Starbucks Foundation strengthens communities around the world by advancing opportunities for youth, veterans, refugees and coffee, tea, and cocoa farmers and their families; supporting communities affected by disaster; and promoting civic engagement.

OPPORTUNITY FOR ALL
In 2017 The Starbucks Foundation worked with 75 NGO partners to directly support more than 25,000 young people, veterans, military spouses and refugees in developing job and leadership skills and connecting them to employment.

SUPPORTING COFFEE, TEA AND COCOA COMMUNITIES
Since 2005 The Starbucks Foundation has awarded origin grants to support farming families in coffee- and tea- growing communities totaling over $21 million, including projects with Eastern Congo Initiative and Heifer International. On National Coffee Day 2017, The Starbucks Foundation announced a $500,000 grant to World Neighbors for a three-year project in coffee communities in Guatemala’s Huehuetenango region, to help improve access to water, promote women’s leadership through savings groups, and increase food security. The Starbucks Foundation will continue to invest in coffee-, tea- and cocoagrowing communities with a focus on empowering women and families with a goal of reaching 250,000 women and families by 2025.

HELPING NEIGHBORS IN NEED
In the past year we have seen hurricanes hit Texas, Florida and the Caribbean, earthquake devastation in Mexico City and wildfires in California. Starbucks acted quickly to provide support, working with nonprofit partners to mobilize immediate relief and longer-term rebuilding efforts. Our customers also joined us in responding to disaster-relief efforts, resulting in more than $2 million in support between The Starbucks Foundation, Starbucks and customer contributions.

In addition The Starbucks Foundation has joined local businesses, organizations, foundations, and individuals to help local nonprofits address the crisis of unsheltered families and children in Seattle and King County with emergency shelter and more stable housing. In Europe, Starbucks celebrated milestone anniversaries in Greece, The Netherlands, Denmark and Austria with donations to local charities that serve children and youth.

CREATING A CULTURE OF INCLUSION
Consistent with our mission and values, we are committed to ensuring our partners, customers and the communities we serve are treated with respect and dignity. We are an equal opportunity employer. In addition we consider all qualified applicants for employment without regard to the federally protected categories of race, national origin, age, sex, religion and disability. We are committed to nondiscrimination policies regarding sexual orientation, marital status, veteran status, and gender identity or expression in decisions regarding hiring, transfer, promotion, compensation, eligibility for benefits and termination.

Women make up one-third of our board of directors, and we have strong representation of both women and minorities throughout the company. Our aspiration is for our leaders to reflect the diversity of our overall workforce, so in 2015, we committed to a 50 percent increase in the representation of women and minorities among our top leaders (senior vice presidents and above) by 2020.

PROMOTING PAY EQUITY
We are dedicated to achieving and maintaining 100 percent pay equity for women and men and people of all races performing similar work. In 2017, women and men who perform similar work in the United States were paid within 99.7 percent of each other. In March 2018, we announced that we reached 100 percent pay equity in the U.S., with a goal of achieving and maintaining 100 percent gender pay equity for all partners in company-operated markets. In support of that goal, we are committed to the principles of equal footing, transparency and accountability in our approach to compensation. In the U.S., our pay equity best practices include not asking job candidates about prior salary, paying newly promoted partners what they deserve for their new role rather than a salary that is tied to what they made before, disclosing pay ranges to job candidates on request, conducting comprehensive compensation analyses of all rewards recommendations with the aim of identifying and addressing any unexplained differences, and publishing our pay equity progress annually.

EMPOWERING HUMANITY
Variation and adaptability are expressions of humanity, and we look at diversity in a multitude of ways. Our nine partner networks (employee resource groups) highlight an area of diversity with a focus on development of members, community engagement and providing insights to our organization. Our commitment to LGBTQ inclusion was recognized with a score of 100 on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index from 2015 through 2018. We are proud to have to have participated in a 2017 White House panel on disability employment and to have achieved a 100 percent score on the Disability Equality Index from 2015 through 2017. In our effort to become the world’s most welcoming environment for people with disabilities, their families and their communities, we launched our Accessibility Office in 2017.

We are committed to building an infrastructure that enables universal design in technology, communications, physical environments and services. In 2017, our first Starbucks signing store in Malaysia celebrated its one-year anniversary, and the store has become a model for our other markets. We invite our Deaf retail partners around the world to wear green aprons with “Starbucks” embroidered in sign language as a source of cultural pride and a helpful cue for customers.

SUPPLY CHAIN DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION
The Starbucks Supplier Diversity and Inclusion Program strengthens our supply chain and serves as a critical component of our commitment to ethically source our products. Our program focuses on developing business relationships with companies that are at least 51 percent owned and operated by a minority, woman, LGBTQ, veteran, person with a disability, or small businesses classified as HUB Zone or 8(a). By actively seeking diverse suppliers, we support our business and invest in the communities where we do business, like Laine’s Bake Shop in South Chicago and Midnite Confection’s Cupcakery in Baltimore. These relationships help us deliver high-quality, innovative products and services across all business channels, while driving value and economic development.

Since reporting our purchases with diverse suppliers in 2000, we have spent a cumulative $6 billion with diverse suppliers. We have also increased from a yearly spend of $38 million to more than $600 million annually. This accounts for approximately nine percent of our total spend in the U.S. and Canada. We have set year over-year growth targets with an ultimate goal of achieving 15 percent of spend with diverse suppliers.

As we look forward, we aim to increase impact by working closely with all of our suppliers to encourage further support of diverse suppliers, thus expanding the first- and second-tier suppliers aligning with the program.